The Furry World from the Inside Out

Tag Archives: furry survey

If you’ve got some time and you’re interested in helping out with furry science, come take the International Anthropomorphic Research Project’s newest, international FurScience survey! They’ve been doing these for years now, and we use the data to help the fandom and those outside the fandom learn more about furries!

Feel free to spread the word about it to other furries you know – they’re trying to make this our biggest and most representative sample of furries ever.

For those curious about the Furry Poll, that will return in 2018, split up into portions that can be completed at your convenience. It got far too long and a pain to complete, so we’re doing all we can to help that.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve had a lot of good conversations about [a][s], what it means, and how best to engage with it.

A lot of those conversations boil down to one core topic, and that topic falls out into one lesson. That is, [a][s] provides what many feel is an important resource. There is a wealth of data, a wealth of ideas, and probably at least three more articles on gender Makyo can write (ohoho…just you wait until tomorrow!). The lesson that comes out of this is that the project should never – indeed, few projects should ever – continue out of a sense of obligation.

Our esteemed Phil Geusz wrote me privately to share his thoughts on this, and brought up some very good points about what goes into running a project. It takes time, steady effort, and dedication. None of what I said two weeks ago is negated: I need to find a healthy level with which to engage (something that falls squarely on my shoulders), and I will gladly accept all the help I can get. Additionally, it could be that the site does need change: the articles and data, through the poll, form a core part of the project, but our voice and scope ought to be continually evaluated.

So let’s keep going. We have more than 41,000 responses to the Furry Poll to plow through and, as my work on tomorrow’s post shows, far more data than shows up when we just search for longitudinal responses, as we have in the past. When you add in the fact that the IARP also has a wealth of data, we have our work cut out for us. Plus, furry remains delightfully weird, so we’ll have no shortage of thinkpieces and longreads to toss out there.

In that time, I’ve received several emails about the state of [a][s]. One of them dubbed this period “The Quiet”, which I feel is pretty accurate, even if it makes me feel a little sad.

Those emails have sat in my inbox. I’ve read them all. Each has three or four drafts prepared for it, none of which I’ve had the wherewithal to send. They’re just there, staring me right in the eye every day – I have four active email accounts, which are tiled neatly in a pinned browser tab, and [a][s] was bottom-left. It was there. Just a big, accusatory Draft.

There are even a few emails stuck in there with more in-depth questions: queries, of sorts, for the publication of articles. Each of those has been ticked with a star, GMail’s nifty way of saying, “this is important, you should probably get to it, soon.”

Sigh.

Oh, and then there’s the furry poll.

Ah jeez.

So, I owe everyone a serious, serious apology. I’ve let a lot of folks down, not least of which myself. [adjective][species] is a labor of love for me, as it is and was for so many others, and letting it fall apart like this does everyone a disservice.

Let’s sit down and see what happened, and figure out ways to fix it. Makyo’s good at a lot of things, and talking something to death is definitely one of them.

[a][s] contributors make the occasional appearance and presentation at conventions around the world (well, okay, a few cons in the US plus Confuzzled in the UK), and Further Confusion is one of our regulars! This year, [a][s] folks have a few panels at FC2017, so if any catch your eye, stop on by and say hi!

Note that times/dates are tentative until scheduling gets locked in by con staff. Bookmark this page and we’ll keep it up to date with any changes. Data was snagged from the panel system directly, but if I missed any [a][s] contributors’ panels, shoot me an email or leave a comment!

Friday

Both gender and furry touch on very important aspects of identity, and the fandom often provides a space in which to explore one’s gender in a safe manner. Join Makyo from Love – Sex – Fur to talk about what gender is and how it interacts with the furry subculture.

Interested in what all goes into having a happy, healthy, positive relationship with you and your partners? Curious on how to make long-distance and in-person relationships work? Come join us in an open panel discussing safe and healthy relationships.

Saturday

There’s a dizzying array of software, hardware and resources, both online and off, for both established and aspiring writers to use. We’ll talk about our favorites (and least favorites), from Scrivener to InDesign, writing guilds to libraries, and all points between.

Come join Makyo from [adjective][species] to explore what it means to be a furry using data from seven years of the Furry Survey and several other resources. We’ll investigate the demographics and interests of the fandom to see what it is that makes us who we are.

Sunday

Don’t just stop at your first idea—it’s probably not your best idea! We’ll talk about generating ideas and show you the value of brainstorming in real time, mining for idea gold. Leave this panel with free story ideas!

Interested in what all goes into having a happy, healthy, sex-positive relationship with your partners? Curious on how to stay safe while playing? Come join us in an open panel discussing safe and healthy sexuality.

Being present and mindful is at the heart of nearly every philosophical tradition. This workshop will introduce the fundamentals of Buddhism and Philosophical Ontology, teach some practices that are useful in diffusing and bringing possibility to everyday situations, and will end with a short mindfulness meditation.

FurScience.com is the home for our wonderful friends over at the International Anthropomorphic Research Project, who has contributed to this site in several ways through the guise of Nuka/Courtney Plante. The IARP does several studies through the internet and through conventions – and these are scientific studies, unlike our Furry Survey, which is primarily a market survey – and through the data that they have gathered, they’ve pulled together a fantastic resource for furries and non-furries alike.

The Fur Science! e-book is a fascinating deep dive into several of the studies that the IARP has done, ranging from demographics to therians and bronies, and everything in between. If you like data just as much as we do, you’ll certainly enjoy paging through the 174 pages of graphs, charts, and explanations. Hats off to Nuka and crew over at the IARP for pulling something like this together.

You can download the e-book for free as a PDF here, and check out the rest of IARPs information and offerings on their webpage.

The [adjective][species] Philosophy Survey is an investigation into what furries think of the world, morality, and knowledge, amongst other things. No prior knowledge of philosophy is needed to complete the survey, and most of the questions will be ones that most people have thought of in their spare time anyway. What we are particularly interested in is if the answers given have any correlation, both with one another, and with the fandom’s demographics: Do older furries tend to hold different views than others? Does one species lean more towards scientific explanation than others? This survey hopes to give insight on these questions.

Overall, the survey will likely take about five minutes or less, though participants are encouraged to think about each question as they go. The results will be anonymous, and used in visualizations. Various comparisons with the general views of society will also help to understand if furries have any majorly varying ideas to the general public. Additionally, where applicable, the results will also be contrasted with David Chalmers “What Do Philosophers Believe?” survey, which gathered the beliefs of professional philosophers from across the world. The survey will run for 2 months, after which, after some time for analysis, the results will be made public (though no personal information will be given, and all results will forever be anonymous).

Thank you for your time. This is an area of furry that many of us wish to explore deeper, and the data from this survey will go a long way to analyzing the community at a deeper level.

The Poll is up! The Poll is up! Tell all your friends, the poll is up! Check here!

No pressure! (Art by Grey)

That’s right, it’s time once again for the furry survey, the fandom’s largest marketing survey. Completing the survey helps to give us a more complete picture of the furry fandom, because otherwise, it’s just some critters writing about themselves. Remember, you can take the survey once per year! If you’ve got a few minutes to spare, take some time to fill out the 2016 Furry Poll.

Furry is an international phenomenon, and English is our predominant language. All our large conventions, from Anthrocon to Eurofurence to Japan Meeting of Furries to Russfurence, cater to English speakers. Attend any of these and you’ll find furries with English as their second or third or fourth language, communicating and participating in our lingua franca.

For a native English speaker, it’s easy to overlook non-English-speaking furry. But it exists, and as best we can tell, the next two biggest furry languages are Russian and Italian.

We are really pleased to be able to present here, for the first time, data from an Italian furry survey (Sondaggio Furry Italiano), that was open over 2012/13. The survey was entirely in Italian, and the results to date have only been published in Italian. Thanks to [a][s] contributor MrMandolino (who is Italian), we can present them here in English. (We’re also republishing the results, and a translation of this article, in Italian.)

Here at [adjective][species] we are just starting to get to grips with the wealth of data collected in the 2015 Furry Survey. We collected valid responses from more than 11,000 furries last year. This collection, including responses from annual surveys dating back to 2009, represents an unprecedented insight into furry.

We recently shared our entire dataset with Nuka (aka Courtney Plante PhD, aka Dr. Cat), who is one of the scientists behind (and co-founder of) the International Anthropomorphic Research Project. He performed an analysis for us, looking at how different factors affect the furry experience, which is presented below.

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[adjective][species] is a blog that takes a look at the furry fandom from the inside. The writings here come from a wide variety of furry authors, and cover any and all meta-furry topics that we can get our paws on.